Trotsky’s starting-point, therefore, was this critical, dialectical and anti-dogmatic
understanding that Labriola had inspired. « Marxism », he wrote in 1906, « is above all a
method of analysis - not analysis of texts, but analysis of social relations ». Let us focus on
five of the most important and distinctive features of the methodology that underlies the
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, in his distinction from the other Russian Marxists ,
from Plekhanov to Lenin and from the Mencheviks to the Bolcheviks (before 1917).

1. From the vantage point of the dialectical comprehension of the unity of the opposites, Trotsky criticized the Bolsheviks’ rigid division between the socialist power of the proletariat and the « democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants », as a « logical, purely formal operation ». This abstract logic is even more sharply attacked in his polemic against Plekhanov, whose whole reasoning can be reduced to an « empty sillogism » : our revolution is bourgeois, therefore we should support the Kadets, the constitutionalist bourgeois party. Moreover, in an astonishing passage from a critique against the Menchevik Tcherevanin, he explicitly condemned the analytical – i.e. abstract-formal, pre-dialectical - character of Menchevik politics : « Tcherevanin constructs his tactics as Spinoza did his ethics, that is to say, geometrically »(3). Of course, Trotsky was not a philosopher and almost never wrote specific philosophical texts , but this makes his clear-sighted grasp of the methodological dimension of his controversy with stagist conceptions all the more remarkable .

2. In History and Class consciousness (1923), Lukacs insisted that the dialectical category of totality was the essence of Marx’s method, indeed the very principle of revolution within the domain of knowledge (4). Trotsky’s theory, written twenty years earlier, is an exceptionally significant illustration of this Lukacsian thesis. Indeed, one of the essential sources of the superiority of Trotskys’s revolutionary thought is the fact that he adopted the viewpoint of totality, perceiving capitalism and the class struggle as a world process. In the Preface to a Russian edition (1905) of Lassalle’s articles about the revolution of 1848, he argues : « Binding all countries together with its mode of production and its commerce, capitalism has converted the whole world into a single economic and political organism (...) This immediately gives the events now unfolding and international character, and opens up a wide horizon. The political emancipation of Russia led by the working class (...) will make it the initiator of the liquidation of world capitalism, for which history has created the objective conditions» (5). Only by posing the problem in these terms - at the level of « maturity » of the capitalist system in its totality - was it possible to transcend the traditional perspective of the Russian Marxists, who defined the socialist-revolutionary « unripeness » of Russia exclusively in terms of a national economic determinism.

3. Trotsky explicitly rejected the un-dialectical economicism - the tendency to reduce, in a non-mediated and one-sided way, all social, political and ideological contradictions to the economic infra-structure – which was one of the hallmarks of Plekhanov’s vulgar materialist interpretation of Marxism. Indeed, Trotsky break with economicism was one of the decisive steps towards the theory of permanent revolution. A key paragraph in Results and Prospects defined with precision the political stakes implied in this rupture : « To imagine that the dictatorship of the proletariat is in some way automatically dependent on the technical development and resources of a country is a prejudice of ‘economic’ materialism simplified to absurdity. This point of view has nothing in common with Marxism » (6).

4. Trotsky’s method refused the un-dialectical conception of history as a pre-determined evolution, typical of Menchevik arguments. He had a rich and dialectical understanding of historical development as a contradictory process, where at every moment alternatives are posed. The task of Marxism, he wrote, was precisely to « discover the ‘possibilities’ of the developing revolution » (7). In Results and Prospects, as well as in later essays - for instance, his polemic against the Mencheviks, « The proletariat and the Russian revolution » (1908), he analyzes the process of permanent revolution towards socialist transformation through the dialectical concept of objective possibility, whose outcome depended on innumerable subjective factors as well as unforeseeable events - and not as an inevitable necessity whose triumph (or defeat) was already assured. It was this recognition of the open character of social historicity that gave revolutionary praxis its decisive place in the architecture of Trotsky’s theoretical-political ideas from 1905 on.

5. While the Populists insisted on the peculiarities of Russia and the Mencheviks believed that their country would necessarily follow the « general laws » of capitalist development, Trotsky was able to achieve a dialectical synthesis between the universal and the particular, the specificity of the Russian social formation and the world capitalist process. In a remarkable passage from the History of the Russian Revolution (1930) he explicitly formulated the viewpoint that was already implicit in his 1906 essays : « In the essence of the matter the Slavophile conception, with all its reactionary fantasticness, and also Narodnikism, with all its democratic illusions, were by no means mere speculations, but rested upon indubitable and moreover deep pecularities of Russia’s development, understood one-sidedly however and incorrectly evaluated. In its struggle with Narodnikism, Russian Marxism, demonstrating the identity of the laws of development for all countries, not infrequently fell into a dogmatic mechanization discovering a tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water (8)». Trotsky’s historical perspective was, therefore, a dialectical Aufhebung, able to simultaneously negate-preserve-transcend the contradiction between the Populists ant the Russian Marxists.

It was the combination of all these methodological innovations that made Results and Prospects so unique in the landscape of Russian Marxism before 1917 ; dialectics was at the heart of the theory of permanent revolution. As Isaac Deutscher wrote in his biography, if one reads again this pamphlet from 1906, « one cannot but be impressed by the sweep and boldness of this vision. He reconnoited the future as one who surveys from a towering mountain top a new and immense horizon and point to vast, uncharted landmarks in the distance »